AGILE CONSULTING

The Repository of Agile Expertise

E N T E R T H E A G I L E W I Z A R D

The imperative to become, as an organization and individually, more agile, starts with an appreciation of the potential that comes from embracing this proven paradigm of agile efficiency, but the realization alone isn’t enough. Rather, it takes time, focus, study, practice and refinement.

But time is the enemy of effective change.

And that’s why corporations, from the largest multinationals to the earliest seed stage startups are, more and more often, turning to the masters of Agile, the Agile Wizards, to infuse the expertise and transfer the knowledge necessary to rapidly, efficiently and effectively transition into an agile enterprise.

The inextirpable march of technology has permeated every facet of life and has fundamentally altered the pace at which business evolves. We’re now firmly entrenched in a society where expectations push the boundaries of possibilities and where adaptation to sea change is no longer an outlier event but, rather, the normal course.

This maturation of expectations has forever altered the business playing field, making simple survival a nearly insurmountable challenge. That is, unless the core methods and methodologies of business evolve to embrace a level of agility that matches the pace of change trigged by exponential growth of technology.

Enter Agile

Agile is methodology, a way of thought, a process innovation that mandates evolution, adaptation, collaboration and continuous improvement. It’s the modernization of what was corporate hierarchy into an agile form of adaptive enterprise, capable of delivery in an era of Internet-driven time.

The Agile process is the antidote to the challenges imposed by time compression and the intricacies of today’s project development. It enables a level of efficiency only possible via deep collaboration, rapid iterations and flexible response to the inevitable march of change.

Since its formation at DuPont and subsequent refinement by James Martin, James Kerr and others, it’s been the proven path. And ever since the publication of Manifesto for Agile Software Development, it’s a path itself evolved to optimize software development.

For well over a decade, corporations have progressively embraced and refined the core principles of Agile; core principles that, time and again, have transformed complacency in the enterprise into the agility necessary to innovate the bits and bytes that drive commerce. And while agility, in it’s common meaning, is essential for mere survival in today’s world, the Agile process, when practiced with excellence, is what drives exceptional delivery, and exceptional delivery is the catalyst of sustainable corporate growth.

An Agile Path

The imperative to become, as an organization and individually, more agile, starts with an appreciation of the potential that comes from embracing this proven paradigm of agile efficiency, but the realization alone isn’t enough. Rather, it takes time, focus, study, practice and refinement.

But time is the enemy of effective change.

And that’s why corporations, from the largest multinationals to the earliest seed stage startups are, more and more often, turning to the masters of Agile, the Agile Wizards, to infuse the expertise and transfer the knowledge necessary to rapidly, efficiently and effectively transition into an agile enterprise.

A G I L E C O N S U L T I N G F R A M E W O R K

Perfected over a decade of practice and refined by fusing an engineering perspective with a keen eye towards the business imperative, OBSS has developed an adaptable, flexible consultancy framework composed from six core modules as follows:

Assessment

We embed our Agile wizards into your organization to gather business intelligence via interviews, surveys and workshops. This on-the-ground exposure allows us to not only collect information, but more importantly synthesize disparate inputs into an understanding of the causative factors underlying the core pain-points within an entity.

This understanding forms the basis of our recommendations, which can be actioned independently or which can form an action plan for further cooperation.

Coaching

We inject our expertise in Agile by integrating into your teams to transform process by transforming mindsets. This approach allows teams as a whole and, more importantly, the individuals who compose teams, to adopt Agile methodologies as they adapt to the thought process underlying agility.

The net effect can be transformational as Agile principles, embraced mindfully, fundamentally alter the pace of change and the quality of change, thus redefining what is a sustainable pace of business transformation.

And even in those rare cases where embedding is not an option, we can tailor remote coaching to at least bootstrap the process of melding minds into engines of agile thought.

Transformation

Transformation, done right, is a constant pursuit, as to remain competitive one must view compliancy as the enemy of business acumen. And that is precisely why we preach our practice of infecting urgency into the souls of our team and our clients. As catalysts of change, we seek to provoke our clients, entire organizations, large bodies of individuals fused into a common vision, to think of tomorrow, today. We seek to spread this passion of agility, to make this spirit contagious. To turn individuals into evangelists of change is our mantra.

But practice has made us pragmatic and that is why we’re mindful that the type of impactful change we’re talking about, where psyches are forever altered, does not occur overnight. Rather, it’s a function of prolonged, persistent and expert tutoring. And that is precisely why each client engagement is a highly customized affair delivered over a long period of engagement and in a highly interactive format.

Tool & Process Customisation

Because the process of transformation is a challenging one, the goal should always be to minimize the fractions of change wherever and however possible. But the question is how and the answer is simple: beyond retaining the right experts as guides to altering the corporate soul, there are tools of the trade that diminish the complexity, abrasion and timelines of systemic organization change.

One key suite of tools is delivery by the Austrian company, Atlassian, who is leading the change and pioneering many of the programmatic mechanisms of agility. It is these tools that we not only recommend, but these are the tools that we provide, as Tukey’s only Atlassian Platinum Partner. And, moreover, with one of the world’s largest in-house Atlassian engineering departments, we have the skills, resources and experience to leverage the Atlassian platform while building the type of customized software that can meaningfully alter the equation when transitioning from an enervated state to the agile mindset.

Development

Embracing an agile mindset is a big step but not the only step towards transformation. Unfortunately, successful reengineering of the soul of an enterprise requires reengineering the pragmatic practices of agile development itself. And this is something that requires a special set of skills, itself a challenge to acquire and best learnt by a form of apprenticeship, carried out interactively by exposing client technical staff to our internal methods of embracing the core predicate of agile development.
For this reason, we strive to create collaborative environments, where technical teams at our clients are paired with our Agile Wizards to infuse far more than book smarts. By using this form of interactive, highly collaborative training we can accelerate the practical skills to realize the transformation in desires that come from learning the Agile ways.

Training

Knowledge is the seed of transformation, fertilized by motivation. And this is why we go far beyond the traditional boundaries of “training” and “consulting”. What we strive for is a true knowledge transfer from our Agile Wizards to our client’s, fertilized by the reasons to embrace guided change.

Our training program embraces, in the truest sense, this notion of incubating deep knowledge because our ultimate goal is that each of our clients become, themselves, an organization of agile wizards.
Towards this end, we fuse practical training, born from practice, extended by a deep theoretical understanding of methodology of change and efficiency, further refined by adherence to the standards and objectives of Agile training as defined by the global leader in Scrum, the Scrum Alliance.

For more details on the breath and range of our training options, please review our training catalogue and feel free to contact us for a more personalized discussion of options and strategies to accomplish meaningful knowledge transform.